Randy has done a bang-up job redesigning his webloggy journal, which tells me it’s something he’s going to keep up with. Joy! He’s given us some javascript eye-candy too – a random terrain generator.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Earth Edition just sent me a Christmas card, and so of course I’ll pass it all on to you. They do their best to explain the 12 Days of Christmas song. Of course, you can buy everything mentioned in the song on the web for only $3,907.60. Bless the web! Bless it!

If Athens were a few degrees farther North, there’d be plenty of snow on the ground. But we’re not, so it’s just cold and very wet.

Apparently, AOL recently reindexed their search engine, and Kestrel’s Nest is showing up near the top of all kinds of searches. A good third of all of the recent visitors have been sent here via AOL. If you’re one of them, welcome! Your search phrase has probably long since been sent to the archives, but you can use the search box to the left to find what you’re looking for. And for those of you searching for “women in thongs” (mentioned in my “In Rehearsal” sidebar item), sorry… no pr0n.

My computer troubles aren’t over, but at least I have a cause and solution. Last week, the “Pin-striped Screen of Death” became progressively worse, and was finally replaced with the system completely freezing roughly 4.3 seconds after Windows started (if it started at all). Quoth the WinBook service rep, “I’ll tell you right now what the trouble is. You’ve got yourself a hardware problem.” So, I’m very carefully salvaging what I can and will send them back the computer. When I return from next week’s vacation (Hi, Marjorie!), I’ll either have a fixed laptop or, more likely, a brand new one. WinBook’s several models beyond what I currently have, and they have a reputation for replacing broken ones with brand-new, much better ones. So, in the meantime, I’m using a spare computer to get me through the week. At home, I patched together a computer that’s set broken for about a year, ran the video signal through my TV, and changed my email from POP to computer-independant IMAP while watching the Simpsons through picture-in-picture. Pretty darn nerdy, I know, but I felt rather clever and resourceful. Also this weekend, I went to a Christmas party (see… I can be social) at the home of my playwright/professor friend that was having his computer censor him. Turns out the problem was Cyber Patrol, pre-installed by Gateway and set to monitor the keyboard for objectionable keypresses, such as “push it,” which got replaced with “puXX XX.” Maybe this is pretty minor in the grand scheme of things, but I really hate it when someone invasively tries to protect me from myself. By the way, if you find yourself on a Gateway computer and really, really want to proclaim what CAP calls the “most foul of foul” words, just type “firetruck” and then delete out letters 2 through 6. That’ll show the man!

Ken Rona wrote a charming description of the weblog community while discussing the potential negative impact of the various weblog ratings out there.

The latest issue of Risks Digest has my story of Windows98 censorship (posted here a couple weeks ago), and that’s already generated more email to me than anything else I’ve ever written. I’ve not found out for sure, but it seems to have been caused by a program called “Microsoft Plus! for Kids Protect It!”. And for the record, I don’t find the program so exciting that it warrants two exclamation points in the title.

Now that my referrer logs are working again, I see that Kestrel’s Nest has been placed on the periodic table of web elements (Kr 36)! That made my morning… especially seeing that I’m a noble gas (Eric does mean “King” after all), right between…. AOL & Excite? Add a proton to me and I become Robot Wisdom! It’s a neat thing, and I wonder how Fairvue came up with elemental placement.

How is it that I never saw The Name of the Rose before today? Sean Connery and a young Christian Slater in a murder mystery set in an Alpine monastary in the 1300’s. Fine cinema.

My computer’s still sick, suffering from the terrible crash of Monday. I’ve been getting the “bleached pin-striped screen of death” as my screen fades to white with multi-colored vertical lines, locking all input devices along the way. I’m running Norton Crash Guard – quoth the Microsoft technician on Monday, “There’s your problem. Crash Guard actually causes crashes. You should get rid of it.” Okay, then! I’ve now reinstalled all the video drivers, and we’ll see where that gets me. Incidentally, while trying to recover my mail files, I installed Netscape Communicator to my system. Despite very carefully answering “No” to repeated queries of “Would you like Netscape to be your default …”, it went ahead and do so anyway to several key file types. It’s not just Microsoft that likes to arrogantly seize control of your system. Hmmm… I didn’t include a link anywhere, and this is a weblog afterall, so here’s one: End of a Ship at Sligo, a tramp steamer that went down off New England in 1925. A table from her saloon is the one which you rest your glass on in “Austie’s Nautical Museum Bar”, and one of her forecastle head ladders, is in Miss Katie Haren’s barn on Coney Island. They are all that remain today of the ill-fated vessel.